Dennis went from zero to sixty on the MidAm in record time, and no one knew how he learned to do what he was doing. He knew that traders had a tendency to self-destruct. The battle with self was where he focused his energies: “I think it’s far more important to know what Freud thinks about death wishes than what Milton Friedman thinks about deficit

One of Dennis’s students said that their teacher believed his physical attributes to be behind his pit-trading success: “You ever heard why he considered himself really successful? He is six feet something and the size of a freight train. He could see over people and more importantly, people could see him. People always knew that he was there. He

tried to be like the house in the casino. It wasn’t that novel.

The Turtles were trained to be trend-following traders. In a nutshell, that meant that they needed a “trend” to make money. Trend followers always wait for a market to move; then they follow it. Capturing the majority of a trend, up or down, for profit is the goal.

Still, the biggest problem with a story like this is that most people don’t want to actually understand how the real pros make big money. They want the road to riches to be effortless.

This is the story of how a group of ragtag students, many with no Wall Street experience, were trained to be millionaire traders.

You can’t have a standard attitude about money and do well in this business. What do I mean by that? Well, my father, for instance, worked for the city of Chicago for 30 years, and he once had a job shoveling coal. So, just imagine coming from his frame of reference, and thinking about losing $50 in a few seconds trading commodities. To him, that

“We were looking for smarts and for people who had odd ideas. There was some experimental part to it.”7 Dennis, however, was clear about what he was looking for. He wanted people who had high math aptitude and high ACT (American College Testing) scores. He wanted people with some interest in computers or market methods. Those who worked to

program (and they did end up cutting people). In essence Eckhardt was saying, “You are not special. You are not smarter than the market. So follow the rules. Whoever you are and however much brains you have, it doesn’t make a hill of beans’ difference. Because if you’re facing the same issues and if you’ve got the same constraints, you must follow